It's time to put it down son.
Posted on 05/05/2010 12:26:34 PM PDT by FormerACLUmember
The Washington Post Co. is putting Newsweek up for sale in hopes that another owner can figure out how to stem losses at the 77-year-old weekly magazine. The publishing industry has been struggling as businesses cut back on ad budgets during the recession. But Newsweek, along with Time magazine and U.S. News & World Report, faces a particular challenge finding a relevant niche in the age of up-to-the-second online news. Once handy digests of the week's events, they have been assailed by competitors on the Web that pump out a constant stream of news and commentary. Despite staff cuts, Newsweek has remained a drag on its parent company, which is also struggling with ad declines at its namesake newspaper. The Post Co. said Wednesday that it has retained the investment bank Allen & Co. to help find a buyer for the magazine. With advertising revenue falling across the industry, Newsweek has been piling up losses since 2007 and expects those losses to continue this year. It did not reveal specifics, but results from the first quarter are due out Friday. The Post Co.'s magazine division had an operating loss of $29.3 million in 2009, compared with a $16.1 million loss the year before. Newsweek sold about 26 percent fewer ad pages in 2009, according to the Publishers Information Bureau. That percentage decline was consistent with the industry average. The magazine has lost about a quarter of its staff to voluntary buyouts over the past two years, ending 2009 with 427 full-time employees. "Newsweek's staff has been remarkable in cutting expenses and putting out a great magazine," Post Co. Chairman Donald E. Graham said in an interview. "But we did not see a path to sustained profitability within the company."
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
That could be fun, but I think they would quit.
Wait just a minute. Have they asked both their subscribers if it is OK to sell their magazine?
Local, home town newspapers will be around for some time to come, and the way may be opening up for a few very large national papers.
The metropolitan and regional papers -- the big city papers that could once sway a state politically are in real trouble.
My gut feeling is that they went for the yuppie audience and got loaded down with trendy lefty arts and entertainment and lifestyle writers.
That pushed the political coverage further left to the point where if you weren't a part of that set you didn't want to bother with the paper at all.
That mass audience is gone. Newsweek's circulation is half what it was two years ago.
The bizarre thing is that much of the decline was intended.
They discouraged renewals and new subscriptions and tried to charge more for the magazine, thinking that people would actually pay more for what was actually less and less.
They thought they could be like the Nation or the New Republic or National Review or the Weekly Standard -- an ideologically focused publication that didn't bother with people who thought differently. But those magazines look much more deeply at things than Newsweek does, and they still lose money! They're subsidized by wealthy patrons and contributions.
The business plan was ridiculous. Meecham and Thomas would go on and on about how they wanted a magazine for serious thinkers and opinion leaders, but they'd publish articles by Evan Thomas's twenty-something daughter who was straight out of college. So much for depth and quality. There was something bizarre about the whole episode, and few will shed tears over Newsweek when it goes under.
But even without the strategic fiasco, there just isn't a big audience for general news magazines. The news cycle moves too quickly, and the magazines are usually pretty superficial compared to what's available elsewhere.
LOL
Looks like I was one of those “bitter, clingers” before it was fashionable. I canceled Newsweek in 1980.
It's time to put it down son.
Really, the newsweeklies’ only role is that of the doctor’s office. They were supposed to be middle-of-the-road, largely inoffensive magazines that added class to an endtable.
Like all things, the Lefties took revered institutions, infiltrated them and took advantage of the years of carefully-cultivated good will. That’s why Newsweek could be a hyper-partisan mag and still sell.
But nobody reads newsweeklies anymore, unless they have nothing else to read.
They hired Evan Thomas’ daughter because that’s all they could afford.
I think Mark Steyn has it down. In the past, journalists were gin-soaked losers who were glad to have a job.
Now, journalists are college graduates (from Ivys, in the case of the big-city papers) who expect the lifestyle of a professional like a doctor or lawyer.
And moreso than the rest of the media, the newspaper writers and publishers see the customer as the enemy. They don't see themselves as providing a product to a beloved customer, but telling these stupid uneducated middle-class simps what they should think.
I think Newsweek could be a profitable conservative media platform if someone like Murdoch bought it. Or at least the name has some value.
I was a reader of Newsweek for 30 years, going back to as a kid in the 70’s. Had a subscription as an adult. But finally a couple years ago they announced their new strategy to be a progressive magazine. Then I canceled and haven’t looked back. I do realize it was getting worse and worse over the last ten years as they let Jonathan Alter and Jon Meachem take it over.
Anyone notice how THIN Newsweek is? It used to be fairly fat with ads.
[A conservative news weekly would do very well, I would think]
Hey RUSH!!!
Bingo! That’s my take on it too.
BatWeek?
Sounds about right. I also think there has been a real effort to feminize the news. Men want the hard facts and for the most part women want human interest tossed in for the awww factor.
Ah... no thanks.
Thank God they want to sell it - since they abandoned the news in favor of "all liberal commentary ... all the time".
I had a five-year subscription [already paid] and let it lapse this year - its been ALL liberal drivel for at least the past two years.
90% of news is crap. Newspapers were never any better, although they used to be more literate. There was simply nothing else to compete. For thirty years, the most popular must have features were "Dear Abby" and Ann Landers. They were two sisters who didn't speak to each other for most of their lives, and they were giving people relationship advice.
Most of the newspaper editors I've known were smug b@stards, although I've known a few that were pretty cool, mostly in small towns. The big city guys were the worst.
Print publications, though, had one great advantage in keeping the gypsies out of the palace. It costs a lot of money to print and deliver newspapers and magazines. Today, on the web, anyone can get published, and it's become increasingly obvious that newspaper writers don't have an opinion that's any more interesting than most of the other people who can string a few words together. Besides, why should I buy a newspaper to read half of an article I read on the internet a week ago?
Now, on to journalism students. The college where I work recently shut down the journalism department. They were the laziest bunch of little jerks I've ever seen. I have never seen anyone more impressed with themselves when they had so little reason to be. None of them wanted to be reporters. They all wanted to be editorial writers. True story: guy I worked with on a small town paper was covering sports, a baseball game. During the game, a runner advanced on a balk. The reporter asked the coach after the game what the play was. The coach told him. When he wrote the article he called it a bawk.
I do love to photograph sports, though:
Been trying to get a shot of a strike with the ball in that position for a while now. Trickier than you think.
Anyway, print's dead. That's it. Too many other choices. It's the same reason there'll never be another Johnny Carson. All Carson had to do was beat one other host and a late movie. Those days are over.
The local birdcage-liner here, the Baltimore Sun, had been leaving a free paper here for 7 years despite my repeated requests for them to stop. They give it away for free to all who want them any time the Orioles play-! I don’t see how they make any money- no one ever reads their garbage-! Theirs is the only paper still stacked up at the local grocery stores at the end of the day.
I could turn this magazine around in one month.
Fire everyone there and hire everyone at Fox.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.